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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28074579">Out of the Skin, Into the Soul</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/draculard/pseuds/draculard'>draculard</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Hannibal (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Afterlife, Ambiguous Character Death, Cannibalism, Corpse Desecration, Ghosts, Graphic Description of Corpses, Hallucinations, M/M, Mutilation, Necrophilia</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 18:00:30</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,361</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28074579</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/draculard/pseuds/draculard</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Desecration, veneration. What's the difference?</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>9</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Out of the Skin, Into the Soul</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Title taken from Pablo Neruda's "Nothing But Death."</p><p>Come say hi on tumblr. My name's draculard there too</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>He must be sleepwalking; that's the only viable explanation for what he sees. The sound of rushing water fills his ears like a roar, deafening him; he can almost hear the cracking of a wounded animal's jaw as it stretches open its mouth and wails in pain. That's the noise in his head right now — half waterfall and half distorted scream.</p><p>Before him, a stag stands on the path.</p><p>The static changes; above the wounded animal's roar, Will hears something new, a whisper that resolves into a voice.</p><p><em>—desecration of a corpse,</em> it says, and then it's gone. He can't tell if it's Jack or Beverly or someone he's never even met, but he can almost picture what they're doing. The fluorescent lights, the white lab coats, the smell of sterilization. Across from him, the stag cocks its head to the side as if asking Will a question.</p><p>From the sparkle in its eye, he thinks it might be asking, <em>What exactly counts as desecration?</em></p><p>It waits for answer; when Will doesn't give one, the stag huffs out a breath that turns to fog in the winter air. It turns slowly, muscles rippling under hide and fur, and takes one step off the path. Dry, dead grass is crushed beneath its hoof; it pauses, turns and looks at Will again.</p><p>Waits for him.</p><p>Will follows.</p><hr/><p>He's heard that phrase, <em>desecration of a corpse</em>, more times than he can count, and now as he follows the stag through the woods, he hears it again — it seems to whisper at him through the rush of water in his ears. The words tangle through dead blades of grass and old brown weeds; they thread their way through the empty tree branches to reach him.</p><p>Years ago, on a case he'd rather forget:</p><p>"—not exactly your average murder," says Zeller.</p><p>"As if anything we handle can be called <em>average</em>," Price adds.</p><p>This was before Will met Hannibal, before he got relegated to classwork. He circles the body on its slab and sees nothing unusual; the smell is piercing, even through this half-memory half-hallucination. It makes him want to cover his nose.</p><p>For a fraction of a second as he looks at the corpse, he thinks the method of murder must be something unusual to earn a comment like that from Price and Zeller. He almost asks, but then, with a flash of insight that makes him close his eyes and suck in an involuntary breath, he just <em>knows</em>.</p><p>"The killer had sex with the body," he announces.</p><p>He opens his eyes just in time to see Price's face fall — he wanted so badly to deliver the news, Will can tell — and Zeller's face screw up in judgment, probably at Will's lack of tone or lack of expression or lack of ... well, everything. This is Will's first real-life study of necrophilia; he ignores the looks he's getting and leans closer to the body, this time perfectly capable of breathing through the smell.</p><p>That smell wasn't off-putting to the man who killed the body on the table — ID'd as Chuck Garza, itinerant truck driver. To whoever killed him, that smell was deep and nuanced like the way the flesh of a mushroom tastes when you let it rest on your tongue. He smelled decay, and instead of that deeply-entrenched sense of horror most humans felt, the killer felt a stirring of arousal. It reminded him of autumn leaves on a forest floor as fall turns into winter; it reminded him of berries rotting on the vine, leaving dark stains on the ground wherever they fall.</p><p>To the killer, this smell isn't repulsive; it's divine.</p><p>To the killer, this body isn't desecrated; it's been honored, the same way one might honor a sacrifice to a chosen god.</p><p>The lab fades; the stag has taken a step off the old dirt path and now stands with its hooves tangled in the roots of an old elm tree. It snorts at Will impatiently, its ears twitching, and ushers him on with a jerk of its head.</p><p>Will follows.</p><hr/><p>"Desecration" — that's the word Jack uses. He stands on a cold Baltimore beach, the sand almost white and the ocean slate-gray. His coat collar is turned up against the wind, and unlike the younger agents and police officers bustling through, he doesn't bother to cover his nose.</p><p>Before him, in sixteen distinct parts, lies a corpse. Will traces a path around it carefully, stepping into his own footprints in the sand. He makes sure not to knock over any evidence markers along the way. Here, a severed hand. There, a left forearm, the flesh unmarked except for rough cuts hacked out at the elbow.</p><p>And here, the head. Brown fluid, composed partially of blood, leaks from its nostrils.</p><p>"Desecrated how?" asks Will, his voice flat as he remembers the necrophiliac. Jack extracts one hand from his pocket and flicks his wrist at the corpse's decapitated head.</p><p>"<em>That's</em> how," he says; Will can hear him struggling to tamp down disgust and disbelief, as if the answer should be obvious to Will — to any normal human being. As if he's somehow deficient for not knowing right away how Jack meant a word as vague and multifaceted as "desecrated" to be defined.</p><p>Along the beach, an FBI agent in an Eisenhower jacket flaps his arm at a seagull, shooing it away before it can land alongside a severed thigh.</p><p>Desecrated because the killer has chopped his victim into sixteen pieces? Will wonders. Or desecrated because he left those pieces here beneath a cold, pale sun, where anyone could see them and where any animal could come to feed?</p><p>He shakes his head; on the far side of the beach, the distant buildings melt away and the dazzling glint of sunshine off sand consolidates into a tiny pinprick. Gradually, as his eyes adjust to sudden darkness, he realizes that pinprick is just a glimmer of light in the stag's eye. He's in the forest again.</p><p>It ducks its head beneath a low-hanging tangle of thorns and flicks its tail, beckoning Will onward.</p><p>Will follows.</p><hr/><p>They say the Chesapeake Ripper desecrates his victims.</p><p>The truth is, Hannibal cleans his victims' bodies. He washes the blood and waste from their skin with the same slow, tender swipes of water and soap that a mother might use to tend to her child — his is the caress of a lover, not a killer, even when he truly despises the people he's killed. Will has seen the way he does it, how even the most impolite victim is treated gently, reverently, and turned into a work of art.</p><p>Hannibal doesn't desecrate; he elevates.</p><p>One could say embalming is a desecration, he whispers one night into Will's ear. One could say autopsy is a desecration, or surgery, or burial or cremation. One could say the purest form of desecration — perhaps the only true form — is leaving bodies to rot beneath the sun, until the bacteria in their stomach spreads and feeds on dead flesh, releasing noxious gas into the air — until their organs bloat and pent-up air pushes their intestines out their rectums and leaves a blood-tinted brown fluid running from their noses. Hannibal has seen dead bodies like that before, as has Will, and he stamps the entire process with one damning word: <em>indignity</em>. </p><p>So how, Will wonders, can anyone look at how Hannibal treats his victims' bodies and compare it to that?</p><p>The stag leads him out of the woods, to the edge of a gray ocean. Cold wind bites at Will's lips, leaving the taste of salt behind like a phantom kiss. He finds Hannibal at the base of the cliffs there, his head tipped back against the rocks, a body lying supine on the sand before him. Will takes one look at the curly-haired head in Hannibal's lap — at the closed eyes and the moisture, perhaps seawater, perhaps tears, on Hannibal's face — and knows.</p><p>He looks at the stag; the stag looks back at him.</p><p>With numb lips and a shaking voice, Will asks it, "What now?"</p><p>With a gentle huff, the stag turns to face the sea.</p>
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